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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The [u.] S. Constitution’s Metaphysical Flaws: Part 1st

The
admirers of the [u.] S. constitutional system are bemoaning the weakness of
Congress before the other branches of the federal government.For ensample:

As the late George Carey and I were writing our
recently published Constitutional Morality and the Rise
of Quasi-Law, we were convinced that we would be criticized for
not providing “solutions” to America’s
constitutional crisis. Still, we refused to engage in the drawing up of utopian
blueprints. Given the nature of our diagnosis, we were convinced that
ready-made solutions would not avail in these times. That diagnosis, in brief,
is that our political class has become too corrupt to understand, let alone
value and defend, the constitutional structures essential to free government
within our political tradition. Not unexpectedly, reviewers have, in fact,
criticized the book for lacking mechanistic solutions to moral problems. Recent
events show, however, that even the most obvious of such solutions have no
chance of success until and unless a far more difficult reform is achieved
within the minds and characters of those who sit in what was designed to be our
sole federal lawmaking body—the Congress. Until Members of Congress rediscover
the most basic virtue necessary to fulfill their role in our constitutional
government—until they insist on exercising the power and taking the responsibility
for passing all federal
laws—no amount of tinkering can hope to restore our republic.

So
why have the functions of the three branches of the federal government become
so disordered (and this is applicable to the idea of the division of powers at
all levels of government in the States)?Because of those very ‘constitutional structures’ Mr Frohnen and others
consider ‘essential to free government within [the u. S.] political tradition’, or,
better said, because of the principles that lay behind them.

At
the foundation is the false idea of absolute divine simplicity (that God is
only essence and not essence and energies) as taught by Plotinus and accepted
by St Augustine (whose speculative teachings broke with the consensus of the
experiential theology of the other Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church); from St
Augustine’s writings it spread throughout all the West through the Roman
Catholics and Protestants, who took him as their main theological teacher.

John
Locke’s idea (repeated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and by
many others) that all government derives from the will of the people is a
secular expression of absolute divine simplicity within the realm of politics:Just as the three Persons of the Holy Trinity
arise from the Divine Essence, so too the three branches of the federal
government arise from the will of the people.

And
just as the absolutely simple Divine Essence of Plotinus and Augustine cancels
out any distinction between the Persons and their acts,

In
fact, the teaching of St. Gregory affects the whole system of theology, the
whole body of Christian doctrine. It starts with the clear distinction between
"nature" and "will" of God. This distinction was also characteristic of the
Eastern tradition, at least since St. Athanasius. It may be asked at this
point: Is this distinction compatible with the "simplicity" of God?
Should we not rather regard all these distinctions as merely logical conjectures,
necessary for us, but ultimately without any ontological significance? As a
matter of fact, St. Gregory Palamas was attacked by his opponents precisely
from that point of view. God's Being is simple, and in Him even all attributes
coincide. Already St. Augustine
diverged at this point from the Eastern tradition. Under Augustinian
presuppositions the teaching of St. Gregory is unacceptable and absurd. St.
Gregory himself anticipated the width of implications of his basic distinction.
If one does not accept it, he argued, then it would be impossible to discern
clearly between the "generation" of the Son and "creation"
of the world, both being the acts of essence, and this would lead to utter
confusion in the Trinitarian doctrine. St. Gregory was quite formal at that
point.

If
according to the delirious opponents and those who agree with them, the Divine
energy in no way differs from the Divine essence, then the act of creating,
which belongs to the will, will in no way differ from generation (gennan)and procession (ekporeuein),which belong to the essence. If to
create is no different from generation and procession, then the creatures will
in no way differ from the Begotten (gennematos)and the Projected (problematos). If such is the case
according to them, then both the Son of God and the Holy Spirit will be no
different from creatures, and the creatures will all be both the begotten (gennemata)and the projected (problemata)of God the Father, and creation will
be deified and God will be arrayed with the creatures. For this reason the
venerable Cyril, showing the difference between God's essence and energy, says
that to generate belongs to the Divine nature, whereas to create belongs to His
Divine energy. This he shows clearly saying, "nature and energy are not
the same." If the Divine essence in no way differs from the Divine energy,
then to beget (gennan)and to project (ekporeuein)will in no way differ from creating (poiein). God the Father creates by the
Son and in the Holy Spirit. Thus He also begets and projects by the Son and in
the Holy Spirit, according to the opinion of the opponents and those who agree
with them. (Capita 96 and
97.)

It is
at this precise point that the uncanny logical accuracy of Photios posed acute
difficulty for the later Western theology. The force of the previous
argument was too much to ignore and some response had to be made. The one
who made it was Thomas Aquinas, writing four hundred years after Photios.
“Of course,” he says, “[the procession] does not proceed further within
itself, but the cycle is concluded when . . . it
returns to the very substance from which the proceeding began.”100
But this argument would only serve to make the procession a feature of
the divine essence, and not of the person of the Holy Spirit. Saint
Photios is ready with a response to this aspect before Thomas ever wrote: If
the dual procession were a characteristic of the divine essence and not a
personal property, then all productions from the Father were features of the
essence, and thus the personal procession or the Spirit from the Son, and even
from the Father, was artificial and superfluous. “If He [the Spirit] is
known more fully in another procession which is proper to the essence,” asks
Photios, “then what precise thing does that fashioning by another person
provide?”101 In other words, if one accepts the concept of personal
processions which are somehow also essential, then there can be no Trinity, and
the filioque will indeed be, as Father Richardson pointed out, a matter
of words!

If the
procession of the Holy Spirit could be a feature of the essence, then so could
the Son’s begottenness: thus why could not the Son be opposed to the Spirit and
the Father, and the latter two may thus beget the Son? At this point it
is important to recall that Saint Augustine also saw this ramification, and
refused to accept it.102 Indeed, asks Photios, why should one
not simply tear up the Scriptures, so as to allow “the fable that the Spirit
produces the Son, thereby according the same dignity to each person by allowing
each person to produce the other person?”103 The deity is defined
as causality, and if each person is fully God, then each must cause the others,
“for reason demands equality for each person so that each person exchanges the
grace of causality inndistin-guishably.”104 With the word,
“indistinguishably” the mask comes off the Neoplatonic simplicity, in which
being, existence, will, and activity are all “wholly indistinguishable.”
When Saint Augustine
saw this implication of his trinitarian method, he simply denied it and said
that the persons were “not interchangeably fathers to one another.”105
The same point is made by Photios:

For if, according to the
reasonings of the ungodly, the specific properties of the persons are opposed
and transferred to one another, then the Father—O depth of impiety!—comes under
the property of being begotten and the Son will beget the Father.106

At
this point, it is abundantly clear that the Neoplatonic structure is not only
“bursting under the strain of its Christian contents,” but that it has
altogether collapsed. The simplicity is an inadequate definition of the
Christian God, for ultimately everything said about Him becomes logically
equivalent to everything else said about Him: by beginning with the definition
of divine essence as simple, the hypostatic feature of the Father has been
distributed to every person and consequently all basis of real personal
distinctions has been lost in the essence.107

In a
very striking sentence, Saint Photios sums up the effects of the new dogma:

On the one hand, you
firmly establish the idea that there is no source—anarchy—in Him, but at the
very same time you reintroduce a source and a cause, and then go on
simultaneously to transfer the distinctions of each person.108

so
too does the absolutely simple essence of the will of the people make the
distinctions between the three branches of the federal government illusory.Thus, legislature = executive = judiciary,
and the lamenting over the failure of the constitutional structure is
thoroughly pointless.It was doomed to
failure from the start because of its metaphysical foundation.

We
will try to have a bit more to say about this soon.

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Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the
Souð!